The supposition that Paul’s second visit to Corinth was a painful visit between the writing of 1 and 2 Corinthians is a staple of modern reconstructions of Paul’s biography, but its basis is surprisingly thin. It rests in large part on a presupposition generated by a particular parsing of the adverb πάλιν in 2 Cor 2:1 τὸ μὴ πάλιν ἐν λύπῃ πρὸς ὑμᾶς ἐλθεῖν. This article revisits the semantics and pragmatics of πάλιν from a contemporary linguistic perspective and concludes that πάλιν, in this particular context, cannot bear the exegetical weight placed upon it. Reconstructions of Paul’s travels need to look elsewhere for evidence.

I’ve compiled a list of the most important publications on Greek word order, grouped in four different approaches (though the latest publications tend to borrow from the others making the categorization somewhat imperfect/arbitrary).

Philological Approaches:

Henri Weil, The Order of Words in the Ancient Languages Compared with that of the Modern Languages, trans. Charles W. Super (Boston: Ginn, 1887).

In a recent article in Christianity Today, Simon Gathercole presents “5 Reasons Why the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife Is a Fake“. It is well worth reading, not just because he has a shout-out to my work in The Gospel Hoax. In the article, he also briefly mentions another fake, “Archaic Mark,” and I thought it would be good to expand on that document and the lessons we can learn from both.

Archaic Mark has been discussed in some detail on the blogs. Briefly, 2427 is an illuminated manuscript of the Gospel of Mark purchased on the manuscript market in Greece in the early 20th century and brought to America. When one of the great American textual critics, Ernest Cadman Colwell, examined the manuscript, he noticed that this manuscript did not have the usual Byzantine text but rather a text very close to that of Codex Vaticanus (B). Equally baffling was the paleography: the hand was so odd that experts could not agree whether it was written in the thirteenth, fourteenth, or even up to the eighteenth century. Though he gave the name “Archaic Mark” to 2427 on account of its old text, Colwell could never shake the feeling that it was a fake and searched without success for a possible exemplar. Then in 1989 it was discovered that its illuminations contain significant quantities of a modern pigment, Prussian Blue, first synthesized around 1704, but this did not settle the question of its curious text, because it was claimed that the illuminations could have been repainted on an otherwise authentic manuscript. It wasn’t until that Margaret M. Mitchell and Patricia A. Duncan published their collation of the text in Novum Testamentum and put high-resolution images of the manuscript on-line in the hopes of stimulating research into Archaic Mark, that I was able to discover that its exemplar was a nineteenth century edition of the New Testament based on Codex Vaticanus, due to certain omissions of entire lines in the source text.

Though every forgery is unique, I believe that a study of forgery helps the critic to identify “red flags” that should cause greater skepticism and scrutiny over potentially sensational texts and valuable documents that come to light. Here is a list of some of them:

1. Poor Provenance. The lack of a solid provenance is a red flag because it provides an occasion to pass off a forgery as authentic. In these cases, both 2427 and the Coptic Gospel Fragments (that is, both the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife and its fellow-lot member, the Coptic Gospel of John fragment) have verifiable provenances that only go back to the immediate collectors. Where they really came from before that is unknown. Forgers can be concerned about provenance and endeavor to fabricate a back-story to support, which is why the back-story must be checked. This is why when it was determined that when one of the Coptic Gospel Fragments was definitively shown to be a fake, the whole house of cards came down. Without a solid provenance for the collection, we were forced to trust that the collector or his sources were legitimate, and Askeland’s debunking of the Coptic John Fragment put that into question. To be sure, many authentic manuscripts also have dubious provenances, which leads us to the second red flag.

2. Too good to be true. This can be a difficult notion to grasp, but when a new text promises to be unusually relevant to present day issues in controversy, this creates a red flag. Most authentic finds are boring and are of limited relevance to all but a few specialists, but forgers may want something more interesting and valuable. In the case of the Coptic Gospel Fragment, this existence of a text mentioning a wife of Jesus was all but predicted by Karen King back in 2003: “It is true that from early on the possibility had existed that Mary Magdalene might emerge from the speculative fray as Jesus’ wife and lover.” (Gospel of Mary of Magdala, pp. 152-153). In the case of the 2427, the Alexandrian text was also too good to be true (though in this case I doubt that the forger had fully appreciated what text he chose to copy).

3. Poor Paleographical Hands. Both 2427 and the Coptic Gospel Fragments had atrocious hands and were difficult to date to a narrow range. Believe it or not, a poor paleographical hand sometimes makes a fake more difficult to debunk, because it becomes easier to explain away its anomalies as a lack of skill or competence. Archaic Mark had such odd feature as abbreviating the article as τ. with a modern period no less. As for the Coptic Gospel Fragments, the hand was so hard to date that it was able to be revised by four centuries when the carbon tests came in.

4. Anomalous Physical Tests. This is major red flag, but it has to be interpreted properly, and it is striking how easily defenders of authenticity find ways of explaining away adverse “scientific” results. In the case of 2427, chemical tests shows that the illuminations contained a modern pigment, yet hope for an authentically old text lingered on, because the illuminations could have been “enhanced” separately from the text. In the case of the Coptic Gospel Fragments, the papyri did not come from the fourth century as expected, but some centuries later. This should have been a red flag. Physical test results unpredicted by the paleography, codicology, and philology should increase, not decrease, our skepticism about the document.

5. Mismatch between Text and Date. Another red flag is that the text does not fit the time it supposedly dates from. In the case of Archaic Mark, a late medieval manuscript with a pure Alexandrian text plus other primitive readings was highly unusual. In the case of the Coptic Gospel Fragments, the dialect of the text did not match the age of the papyrus.

6. Dependence on Modern Editions. Both 2427 and the Coptic Gospel Fragments suffered from this. There was hardly anything in the texts that could not be explained by the dependence of an intelligent but not necessarily skilled forger. Though 2427 had an Alexandrian text and some spectacularly early readings, all of these were available in nineteenth century editions of the New Testament. As for the Coptic Gospel Fragments, nearly every word and phrase of the GJW except the most famous one could be found in the Gospel of Thomas, and the Coptic John followed the text of a published manuscript of John.

These red flags are not proof by and in themselves. The totality of the circumstances has to be weighed together, taking into account not just what an authentic document would look like but also the kinds of features that are common to forgers. These features I have identified as red flags, and upon finding one or more of them, the critic should be spurred on to investigate the matter in more detail. And when that happens, more definitive proof may be discovered. For example, the line break of modern editions doomed both Archaic Mark and the Coptic Gospel Fragments. In the case of the former, the forger accidentally skipped over entire lines of Buttmann’s New Testament edition. In the case of the latter, both Coptic Gospel Fragments perpetuated the line breaks of texts that were buried in antiquity and then became available in the twentieth century: the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife shared a line break with the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, and the Coptic Gospel of John fragment shared every other line break but one with the Qau codex. This goes to show that critics concerned about forgery should consult the editions available to forgers and look for coincidences.

I have just heard the sad news of the recent passing of James W. Deardorff. Among other things, he was the author of The Problems of New Testament Gospel Origins (Mellen, 1992), making him the most active and published modern proponent of a type of Augustinian hypothesis for solving the synoptic problem.

There is no abstract but the concluding paragraph expresses the thesis of the article:

Accordingly, the postulation of a pre-existing, forty-member genealogy structured around Abraham, David, Josiah, and Joseph does more than merely solve a math problem. It also provides a window into the diversity of early Christological beliefs and one person’s attempt to reconcile various traditions and ideas about Jesus. However interesting the supposition of a pre-composed genealogy may be, it is not the final product. Matthew’s text is what must be explained, and there have been many attempts to count its generations. Of these, the least problematic is that Matthew double-counts David, just as the text tells us to do by reiterating David in v.17. David is thus the key to counting the generations in Matthew’s genealogy. Other attempts abandon the precise wording of v.17 in favor of a more ideally symmetric arrangement of three sets of fourteen. But this one misstep begets another, forcing exegetes to suppose additional complications—that our text is somehow missing a generation, that the author somehow alluded to the missing generation ever so subtly, or that Matthew somehow miscounted, even though the opening section is where authors ordinarily exercise the most care. Rather, the simplest solution is that Matthew tolerated a slight deviation from symmetric perfection, and so should his interpreters.

My colleague, Steve Runge, has announced an opportunity to study Greek discourse with him this summer and get paid for it. I’ve been reading Greek for thirty years but it was his work that allowed me to see things in the text in a whole new light. See his post about this summer internship program at Logos.

The Call for Papers for the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature is up.

Here are two of them:

NEW TESTAMENT TEXTUAL CRITICISM
Jennifer KnustDescription: The New Testament Textual Criticism Section seeks to foster the study and criticism of the text of the New Testament—including examination of manuscripts and other sources, restoration of the text, and especially the investigation of the history of its transmission—in its Late Antique cultural context. SBL has had a group dedicated to this topic as far back as 1946.

Call for papers: The NT Textual Criticism Section is sponsoring four sessions in 2014: (1) an open panel addressing the 28th edition of the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece; (2) a second open panel which welcomes papers on all aspects of the textual transmission of the New Testament; (3) an invited panel considering the CBGM (Coherence Based Genealogical Method) which will assess and evaluate the implications of this method for text critical research; and (4) an invited panel on the transmission of the text of the Epistle to the Hebrews, jointly sponsored with the Hebrews Section and Papyrology & Early Christian Backgrounds Section, which will examine recent papyrological evidence and the text of Hebrews in the Editio Critica Maior. For the session on the NA28, we are particularly interested in presentations that involve its revised text of the Catholic Letters, its print and digital usability, or its omission of material that used to be present in earlier editions.

SYNOPTIC GOSPELS
Robert DerrenbackerDescription: The Synoptic Gospels as a unit have played an important role in modern scholarship, including, but not limited, to the relationship between the gospels. This section provides an forum for discussion of papers from a variety of perspectives and critical methods on the content and formation of the Synoptic Gospels, and what they reveal about the contexts of their composition.

Call for papers: The Synoptic Gospels section invites proposals for papers for two open sessions on the content or formation of any of the Synoptic Gospels, and we especially are interested in papers that address the relationship between two or more of the gospels or deal with themes that touch on multiple gospels. A third session, sponsored jointly by the Bible in Ancient and Modern Media Section and the Q Section, will focus on ancient media culture and the Synoptic Problem; for this session, only invited papers will be read. A fourth session will be a joint session with the John, Jesus and History group, and will address relationships between John and Matthew; for this session, only invited papers will be read.

Uppsala University is an international research university focused on the development of science and education. Our most important assets are all the individuals who with their curiosity and their dedication make Uppsala University one of the 100 best universities in the world and one of Sweden’s most exciting work places. Uppsala University has 40,000 students, 6,000 employees and a turnover of SEK 5,500 million.

The position is for two years, beginning as soon as possible and at the latest April 1, 2014.

The Faculty of Theology is the oldest of nine faculties at Uppsala University and encompasses all areas of religious studies at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels (M.A. and PhD): History of Religions, Biblical Studies, Church and Mission Studies, Systematic Theology, Ethics, Psychology of Religion, and Sociology of Religion. The Faculty of Theology is the largest institutions for education and research in theology and religious studies in Sweden.

The position as Postdoctoral Fellow in Old Testament exegesis involves primarily the Fellow’s own a research project (e.g. a monograph project which is not a rewriting of the doctoral dissertation).

Duties: The primary responsibility of the Postdoctoral Fellow is to pursue her or his own research project. A certain amount of teaching at the department of Theology is also included – but not more than 20% of the working time. The Postdoctoral Fellow is expected to be present at the Department at least three days per week and actively participate in the ongoing academic conversation within the discipline and at the department.

Qualifications required: Doctoral degree (PhD) in theology/religious studies or an equivalent doctoral degree. Documented knowledge of sources and resent research in the area, as well as competence in scholarly methods used in Old Testament exegesis/Hebrew Bible. Good communication skills and ability to collaborate with colleagues in various disciplines in theology/religious studies are important. Proficiency in English is a requirement.

Qualifications desired: Ability to understand written and spoken Swedish.

Requirements: The applicant for theposition as Postdoctoral Fellow must have completed a doctoral degree in religious studies or an equivalent doctoral degree less than three years before the application deadline. If there are acceptable reasons, the doctoral degree can have been completed earlier. Such reasons include sick leave and parental leave or a leadership position in a labor union.

The application may be written in Swedish or English and must include
– CV
– Copy of the official academic transcript of the doctoral degree in religious studies or equivalent PhD.
– Copy of the dissertation and of any additional academic publications (maximum three additional publications).
– A description of the following:

why you are interested in this position (ca. 500 words),
how you plan to take part actively in the ongoing academic conversation at the department (ca. 500 words)
your research project (including the problem addressed, theoretical perspective, methodology and a presentation of materials that you plan to analyze) and the project’s significance for Old Testament/Hebrew Bible exegesis (4000–5000 words).
– Names, email addresses, and telephone numbers of three academic references.
– Indication of your earliest availability to begin the period as Postdoctoral Fellow. April 1, 2014 is the latest starting date.

Criteria for selection: In the selection among qualified candidates, particular importance will be paid to (1) academic qualifications, (2) assessment of the academic potential of the proposed project, (3) the relevance of the project in relation to ongoing research in the discipline in the faculty, and (4) readiness and capacity to take part in the ongoing academic conversation in the discipline.

The University desires to recruit the colleague who, in an overall assessment of ability, competence and documented qualifications, has the greatest ability to develop and complete the proposed research project.

The University strives for gender equality, and women are especially invited to apply for this position. Personal circumstances (e.g. parental leave), which could help the assessment of an applicant’s qualifications, may be given with the list of the applicant’s merits and experiences.

Salary is calculated relative to qualifications.

Further information about this position is provided by Professor Göran Eidevall ph. +46 18 471 26 67, E-mail: Goran.Eidevall@teol.uu.se.

You are welcome to submit your application until January 15, 2014 UFV-PA 2013/3167. Please use the link below to access the application form.

Logos Bible Software is proud to sponsor a workshop on Friday, November 22, from 1:00 to 4:30 PM in conjunction with the ETS and SBL conferences. It will be held in the Hilton Baltimore Paca Room (third floor, page 6 of map). This interactive workshop introduces graduate students and scholars to the application of discourse studies to NT exegesis. It offers an accessible survey of foundational concepts, and it does not require a specialized knowledge of linguistics.

Each session will cover a different set of linguistic devices and apply this knowledge to exegesis of select NT passages.

Jenny Read-Heimerdinger, University of Wales, Trinity Saint David
Keeping Track of Participants—Use of the Article with Proper Nouns.

It is commonly observed in grammars of NT Greek that the use of the article with definite nouns (especially proper nouns, such as names of people) is subject to variation. Curiously, the article is sometimes omitted, even though the noun remains definite. And there is further extensive inconsistency among the early manuscripts. Some explanations for this irregularity have been attempted by traditional grammars, but no firm rules have been established. The approach of discourse analysis, however, with its concern for the patterns of language above the level of the sentence, has been able to identify clear principles that govern the choice to use the article with a definite noun or to omit it. In this workshop session, there will be an introduction to the topic, presenting in clear and simple terms the factors involved; time will then be devoted to examining two passages of the NT to see how these principles operate in practice. The aim will be for participants to acquire a clear notion of the reasons for including or omitting the article and the impact of the variation on an author’s intended message. (60 min)

Textual criticism is a discipline that requires painstaking, careful exegesis of the Greek textual tradition. Even the tiniest variant can affect the meaning of the text, so textual critics must be able to assess what that effect is in order to evaluate which reading more likely belongs to the author than to a scribe. In my doctoral work on the text of Galatians, I had to turn to the insights of discourse analysis for several variants where the traditional exegetical tools have not been so helpful, particularly those involving sentence connectors, word order, and certain uses of the article. This workshop takes a look at a select set of textual variants in Galatians and uses them to demonstrate the usefulness of discourse analysis in the exegesis of Galatians. (60 min)

Steven E. Runge, Logos Bible Software/ University of Stellenbosch
Understanding Greek Verb Forms Based on their Function Instead of their Translation

There are a number of differences between the Greek verbal system and the one we are familiar with in English. These mismatches between the languages have led to descriptions of the Greek system being framed in terms of the English one—largely based on how it is translated. This presentation will provide a functional overview of the verb forms in terms of what they do, regardless of how they are translated. Primary attention will be devoted to the tense forms in the indicative, describing their prototypical function in narrative and nonnarrative. Attention will also be given to the exegetical implications of finite vs. nonfinite verb forms. These principles will then be applied to a passage containing narrative and nonnarrative text types. Understanding the discourse considerations which guide selection of tense forms and moods will enable participants to better understand their prototypical functions, and to ascertain the exegetical implications of departures from these expected norms. (60 min)

Discussion and General Questions (30 min)

These sessions are not your standard academic papers, but interactive presentations designed to teach and foster discussion. Space is limited, so please RSVP if you plan on attending by emailing discoursegrammar@logos.com.

Continuing the retrospective, Robertson, p. 882 gives another reason for why the subject of the Greek verbal system is complex:

4. GRADUAL GROWTH OF THE GREEK TENSES. There is no future optative in Homer and no future passive. The aorist passive is also rare.6 The past perfect is rare in Homer,7 and it does not occur with the idea of relative time. “In the examination of tense usages, we must be careful to observe that tenses, in the sense in which the word is now used, are of comparatively late development.”8 In the beginning the verb-root was used with personal suffixes. At first this was enough. Some verbs developed some tenses, others other tenses, some few all the tenses.

Like note about Latin, Robertson’s criticism has less purchase now because less people know Homeric (or even Classical) Greek today, especially among those who study the New Testament. Nevertheless, it is always to good to keep in mind that a verbal system is not a static entity, but one that changes over time.

The last three sentences rather cryptically allude to the state of affairs of the verbal system in Greek’s ancestral language of Proto-Indo-European. Those interested more on that topic ought to consult Andrew Sihler’s Comparative Grammar for one perspective.